No Country for Women - Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 40 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

EVENTS

Crazy Catholics!

Fuck God
Fuck Church
Fuck Religion
In Gay We Trust
Femen activists were acting yesterday as half naked nuns and spraying Jesus’s ‘holy sperm’ when 100,000 crazy catholics took to the street against legislation allowing gay marriage in Paris. I love these Ukranian topless activists. They are fiery, fearless and always for the right cause.RT described how Femen activists were assaulted by anti gay marriage demonstrators.

As protesters tried to push the topless feminists away scuffles erupted. Police had to use teargas to disperse the crowd.

Police and LGBT activists had to surround the Femen women to protect them from indignant demonstrators. The topless activists were later taken to a police station.
Femen called those who “attacked” them “religious nationalists,” saying that their action “In gay we trust” was “aimed at spreading progressive ideas of civil and sexual freedom into religious people’s minds.”

Activists also claimed that two Femen protesters were injured during the skirmish, with one losing a tooth and another allegedly having her nose broken.

The movement reacted with threats of revenge.

“Femen promises not to forget this incident and to take revenge on the organizers in the best Christian tradition: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” they wrote on their webpage.

French President Francois Hollande promised that he would legalize gay marriage and adoption of children by gay couples. It will surely happen. France already legalized gender-neutral civil unions in 1999. I am not worried about gay rights in a country like France. But I feel proud of Femen for being at the right place at the right time to oppose insane people. There are many insane people in every country, but unfortunately every country does not have many angry and courageous women like Femen activists.

Comments

RT photos seem to show primitive, macho men attacking intelligent, questioning women – so like the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. In other countries it’s exactly the same. Same primitive mentality, just the religions are different.

Roger, how on earth are you going to convince people if you consider them “primitive”?

Those against same-sex marriage are just as genuine in their convictions as you are. If you cannot bring yourself to respect them (which does not mean agree with their views), how can you expect them to respect you?

I see people who are terrified they will no longer fit in the society they live in. Their fears are real, even if they are not based on reality, and they need empathy with those fears to surmount them, not name-calling and pigeonholing.

=> “Those against same-sex marriage are just as genuine in their convictions as you are.”

So are racists, slave traders and megalomaniacs who think they’re entitled to ruling the world. What they all have in common is that their “convictions” come at the expense of others.

=> “I see people who are terrified they will no longer fit in the society they live in. Their fears are real, even if they are not based on reality, and they need empathy with those fears to surmount them, not name-calling and pigeonholing.”

I disagree. First and foremost they need to be prevented from harming others, in this case gay people. Then they can be consoled over the loss of privileges which they were never entitled to in the first place, and over the fact that they have to find other ways of boosting their egos than bullying innocent minorities.

I see people who are terrified they will no longer fit in the society they live in. Their fears are real, even if they are not based on reality, and they need empathy with those fears to surmount them, not name-calling and pigeonholing.

Contemptible views deserve contempt.

Expressions of contempt can be constructive.

That’s how we have mostly marginalized the worst forms of racism and sexism in the West—by showing contempt for bigots.

That may cause many bigots to double down in reaction against such attacks, but it also has several positive effects.

One of them is that many of those people will chicken out, and mostly stop saying bigoted shit in public, even if they continue to believe it, for fear of being treated with contempt.

That’s good.

Another positive effect is that it sways many people on the fence, and leaning the other way. Nobody wants to be a bigot if bigots are treated with contempt, and many people will take the issue seriously and look into it, and decide that they don’t want to be bigots anyhow. Frequent reminders that such views earn disrespect makes many people more careful about holding them. It erodes their confidence in their stupid and barbaric ideas.

Maybe the most important effect is on children and adolescents. If they grow up in an environment where bigotry is not tolerated, much less accepted as respectable, they’re more likely to grow up thinking bigotry is stupid—just as many young people in the US are not homophobic, having grown up with out gay people.

Even if the older people never change, and we have to wait for them to die off, that’s a very, very good thing in the long run.

We may piss off the older set-in-their-ways bigots, but in the long run they’ll die, and we’ll win. That’s very very good.

Honesty actually has its uses. If you have contempt for people’s views, on sober reflection, it can often be a good thing to say so. Humoring bigots and deferring to them out of “respect” for their humanity is generally a bad idea. Sure, they deserve a certain minimal respect as humans, but they also deserve contempt as bigots.

Bigots’ contempt for people of a different race or sex or sexuality should generally be met with contempt.

I don’t think that the ridiculousness of religion-based homophobia is especially “subjective,” and I don’t think that stupid and harmful discrimination against innocent classes of people is a bad thing to feel or express contempt for—if anything deserves contempt, that has to count.

(And yes, it is stupid, since it’s grounded in religion, which is stupid.)

If you’re going to talk about values at all, that’s as close to “objective” as you’re likely to get—and a lot closer than a lot of people think who go around dismissing moral claims as “subjective.”

Sure, you could just feel sad, or even apathetic, but feeling and expressing contempt is not inappropriate, or useless, or necessarily a bad thing.

Well, of course it is problematic to categorize something that 88% of the world practices as “stupid”, especially since even anthropologists have declared human religious inclination to be genetically based and an evolutionary development. Even those who are not religious are more prone than others to embrace pagan supernatural beliefs (generally referred to as superstitions).

With this, your declaration as stupid of an innate characteristic practiced by most of the world today as well as the overwhelming vast majority of humans that have ever lived, is nothing more than religiophobic based bigotry.

A majority of people believing something because they have an innate tendency to do so, irrespective of whether there’s good reason to believe it, does not make it not stupid.

It simply explains why people tend to be stupid in that way.

Have you read Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer? (He’s an anthropologist.) You should. It explains why people tend to believe in supernatural stuff, and build religions around it. (Despite it being pretty clearly untrue so far as science can tell.)

The majority of people used to think that the world was flat. That didn’t make it true, or not stupid to continue believing despite evidence that the world was round. (Such as the circular shadow the Earth casts on the moon.)

Oh, yay, a concern troll, and one who imagines he know another person’s goals or agenda. Sweet!

Oh, the bigots need empathy, how enlightened. Hard to be empathetic with the asshole who accost you and don’t treat you with any empathy, but violence and marginalization. If you have a magic pill that makes irrational people rational, or maybe an anti-fear night light for them, go for it. The people on the other side, however, experience real fear. For their lives, livelihoods, and personal health and well-being.

It is quite easy to know what is the real agenda of FEMEN, you just have to ask who funds them: FEMEN is a Zionist organization, funded by apostate Jews, whose objective is to destroy christianity and Islam.

“Those against same-sex marriage are just as genuine in their convictions as you are. If you cannot bring yourself to respect them (which does not mean agree with their views), how can you expect them to respect you?”

HAHA, then they are also genuine assholes? And so are you for trying to give them cover.
This isn’t about “respecting points of view” it is about civil fucking rights. Take your sohpistry else-where.

It has nothing to do with civil rights. No one has the right to their desires. A straight man and a gay man both have the same marriage rights. Both have the right to marry a woman. One not desiring to marry a woman doesn’t change this fact.

The problem with your analogy is that the TRULY poor, given a choice, would not sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal bread. They actually desire specifically what the non-poor have but simply don’t have access to it.

Pretty much all men have access to women though with the unchecked hypergamy going on today, this may change. The desire not to be with women is not a criteria for changing laws.

Prohibition of same-sex marriage is pure sexism. If a man wants to marry Mary, and Mary agrees, he can. If a women wants to marry Mary, and Mary agrees, she can’t, because the law discriminates on the basis of sex. Sex discrimination, plain and simple.

Now, regressive religions which approve of sex discrimination in all walks of life, believe in “men’s roles” and “women’s roles”, and other such bull, would of course oppose same-sex marriage. But anyone who believes in equal rights for men and women had better think it through.

So we can eliminate all of the double standards that allow women to qualify for military, police, fire departments, etc. We can stop charging young men higher prices for auto insurance and eliminate the Violence Against Women act. We can eliminate women’s studies in universities and make all restrooms co-ed.

We can stop giving women lighter sentences for the same crimes, eliminate chivalry, stop automatically awarding custody of children to women, eliminate gender affirmative action, etc.

Gender related standards have been the norm forever and women subscribe to them especially when those different standards benefit them. So don’t give me this sexist crap. We all have the same right to marry the opposite gender.

I thought that the French system was that the “civil union” was the required system for anyone who wanted to join together in a pair bond. And “marriage” was just a religious ceremony that some people appended on top of that. First, the legal business, then the religious ceremony – if you wanted one.

It’s my understanding that all of the legal rights are afforded by the union. And none are afforded by “marriage”. And without the union, you don’t have the legal rights, even if the church marries you.

Not quite right, but the legal stuff is rather complicated to explain. France has separate “civil marriage” (with sex discrimination) and “civil union” (without), *neither* of which has anything to do with religious marriages.

The proposal is to merge “civil marriage” and “civil union”, which is a good idea.

Cannabis legalization advocates routinely provide a long list of studies showing that alcohol is less dangerous than cannabis — and therefore that making alcohol legal and cannabis illegal is *irrational* if the goal is to make people’s lives better.

This mentality is why NAMBLA exists. They want something and feel harmed that they can’t have it and they are pushing for it.

Your mentality is evidently more similar to NAMBLA’s than ours. If you can’t see the huge difference between committed, loving relationships between consenting adults and sexual exploitation of children by adults, you’ve got serious problems.

If your reasoning made any sense, it would also make sense to ban straight marriage because some people are heterosexual pedophiles and ephebophiles.

You seem to dismiss homosexuality as a mere “desire” that people don’t have the moral right to act on.

Why do you hate our freedom? Why should you have the right to regulate other consenting adults’ romantic lives?

Please explain this tripe. You are just tossing something out there. I guarantee that in a conversation with a NAMBLA member, they will argue than you are imposing your morals on them. They will argue that it is not exploitation. They will cite the popularity of pederasty in ancient Greece, etc. They have the same view of the banning of their desires as you have of the banning of your desires. Do you believe that they are not treated EQUALLY? Of course you don’t. It is their desires that are not treated equally and in my opinion, as well as yours, their desires should not be treated equally.

If your reasoning made any sense, it would also make sense to ban straight marriage because some people are heterosexual pedophiles and ephebophiles.

What reasoning are you talking about? I have not even stated that any type of marriage should be banned. I am stating that gay marriage is not about marriage EQUALITY. All men have the same marriage rights. It’s about a segment of the population who wants the law to be alterred to meet their desires.

You seem to dismiss homosexuality as a mere “desire” that people don’t have the moral right to act on.

Homosexuality is basically a sexual orientation that involves the desire for sexual intimacy with the same sex as opposed to sexual intimacy with the opposite sex. Where am I wrong? I don’t believe that it is a choice.

Why do you hate our freedom? Why should you have the right to regulate other consenting adults’ romantic lives?

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Sexual promiscuity in the homosexual community would be lessened if they had to face all the restrictions of legally binding marriages. I don’t see why people use this as an excuse to batter gays. If you haven’t noticed, we of the straight community are often just as guilty of this. Well, those of us who are lucky enough to be guilty of it.

Social justice warrior hypocrisy is such a sight to behold. What they don`t like is automatically racist, sexist, bigoted, or all of the mentioned combined. Looking at these images I have a hard time deciding which of those sides is actually insane party. Who in their right mind would turn to public indecency to get their point across, especially if the message is barely coherent and riddled with buzzwords and/or slogans.

How can you love paid whores by soros who just play their job , you can find them on net like facebook giving their behind for money, femen are just prostitutes from Ukraine and France paid by foreign lobbies to make subversive action, what a joke

Fuck off gay’s. What on Their mind , what they knew was born where ?
v ,
– v – ,
or v – ?.
How there is life in the world if all gay ?. U can give an answer.
Maybe they (gay) give answer. : we have medical science. helloooooo…. No sense.
From beginning Until now mankind is because man and women cooperation.
If the first man in the world there is only ONE man ( women) … Is there life in the word ?. Have medical science ?.
So fuck off gay’s. Maybe Allah help you